“How is he?” Cor asks.
We’re standing beside the ration distribution line off the center of the square, based out of the Cheapside guardhouse. The line winds around the square; guards are shouting at the crowd to have their left sleeve rolled up, ready to show their wristband. Aela and Maurana circle overhead.
“You could visit him,” I tell Cor.
Cor squints away from me, up at the old Cheapside dragon perch silhouetted in the autumn light, and says: “I can’t. I’m still too angry.”
“He’s still him, Cor—”
“I don’t know what that is anymore.”
When Atreus calls me into his office a week later, I’m relieved to find he’s ready to discuss Lee’s situation at last. But then, with little to no preamble, he introduces the solution he’s considering. After he has described it to me, he says:
“I was not unmoved by your story, Antigone. And I believe—I am eager to believe—that you have certain insight into Lee’s character. I would like you to use this insight to help me now. This is a risk I would not undertake lightly, without substantial reason to believe it would go in our favor. So I am asking you what you think the outcome would be. Answer carefully, for you take the fortune of Callipolis into your hands.”
Though his solution does not, now that it faces me, feel surprising—in fact it feels as though it has been long coming, something I should have seen from the start—still, I am short of breath.
“Antigone?” he prompts.
“Do it,” I say.
I’m sorry, Lee.
LEE
On Crissa’s visits, we talk mostly about the newspapers, or books I’ve been reading, or the flying conditions, which I am able to discern through the window. But sometimes I ask her about the corps. About the others. About Cor.
“Does he believe Power?”
Crissa sits, cross-legged, on the opposite side of the bars, her hair glowing softly in the torchlight. Our hands are wound together in her lap. “No. Of course not. He’s stood by Annie from the start. Rock, too.”
Then why won’t they come?
“It’s hard for them, Lee.”
“It isn’t hard for you?”
Crissa pushes stray curls back from her face and shakes her head. “This? No. This isn’t hard for me.”
But as to what is hard, she doesn’t say. When the Protector’s Guard interrupts our visit to give me my summons to Atreus’s office, she kisses me on the mouth, in front of them.
“Go be good and brave, as you’ve always been.”
The guard escorts me to Atreus’s office on either side. I’m acutely conscious of the differences between now and the last time I was here: I’m no longer in uniform and my wrist is bare. Still, it’s good to stretch your legs after so many days in one room.
“Lee,” says Atreus gravely, gesturing at one of the ornate chairs facing his desk, “please sit.”
He nods to the guards to leave us, and then we’re alone. The glass wall overlooking the Firemouth spills afternoon light across his desk.
“Are you aware of what day it is?” Atreus asks.
I’ve been keeping track, so I give the date. Atreus nods.
“Do you know what will happen in a day’s time?” he asks.
I shake my head.
In answer, Atreus passes a piece of paper across the desk to me: the letter from Julia. In a day’s time, I realize, she’ll go to the Riversource and wait for me.
“You may already know that I have spoken to Antigone, as you requested. She confirms your story. You do seem to have led a life of . . . unusual allegiances.”
I wait. This seems to be a reprieve, of sorts, but it can’t be the end of it, or else we would have had this conversation a week ago, after she first spoke with him.
“Nevertheless,” Atreus goes on, “one cannot help having reservations. I believe you have attachments to Antigone, and she to you. Considering your background, it is remarkable; though considering the exigencies that threw you together, it is also understandable. I also believe—and am impressed by—the fact that you have sustained contact with, but continued to refuse, the family that reached out to you from New Pythos.
“But I’m also afraid that mere refusal of your family is not enough. I cannot risk Callipolis’s safety on the fact that you surrender me a letter and tell me you care about a girl whose family your father butchered. There is a war coming, Lee. Your family and their dragons will come again, by the end of this winter at the latest. When they come, every one of our sparked dragons will be integral to our defense. I need soldiers loyal to their City, I need Guardians loyal to an idea, and I need them ready to kill for it. In short, I need to know, not just that you can refuse those on the other side, but that you are ready to fight them. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say.
Here it is at last, I think. Tyndale’s question, on the table, to be pushed aside no longer. Julia’s ultimatum, about to be laid bare.
“Good,” says Atreus.
“What do you want me to do?”
I’m pretty sure I already know the answer, and when Atreus nods at the letter, I’m not surprised. Even so, the way he phrases it makes me flinch.
“I want you to take your dragon, meet their Firstrider, and return with two heads in a bag. If you can’t do that, don’t come back at all.”
18
THE RIVERSOURCE
“My son,” said Leon Stormscourge, in Dragontongue. “Please, Atreus.”
“Leo will be looked after,” Atreus said.
Then he turned to the soldier beside him and gave him an order.
The soldier, who’d been watching the boy, didn’t hear it at first. The boy couldn’t have been older than eight—though what little of his expression the soldier could make out beneath a mask of blood was not the kind of expression that belonged to an eight-year-old.
The soldier, who had grown up thinking of dragonlords and their sons as another race, another species, was surprised to find himself thinking that no child, not even a dragonlord’s, should ever wear a look like this.
Then he heard Atreus’s command. It had been said so quietly, the soldier thought at first he had misheard it.
“Take the boy into the hallway,” Atreus murmured, “and slit his throat.”
ANNIE
“He won’t do it,” Cor says.
“Yes, he will,” I answer.
We’re standing in the fleet commander’s office, a desk between me and them, and the door is shut. My palms are planted, flat, on the desk’s surface. Since becoming acting commander, I’ve organized and stacked all of Lee’s papers.
“People don’t kill their relatives,” Rock says, like I need this explained to me.
“Lee isn’t people,” I tell them. “He’ll do it. They’re both Firstriders; he’s always known what that would mean.”
Cor makes a ticking noise of skepticism. His arms are folded.
“Annie,” Rock says, his voice rising, “you understand what happens if he doesn’t do it, right? You understand who will have to deal with him if he changes sides? You.”
I answer with rising anger.
“Yeah, that’s occurred to me, Rock.”
“And you’ll be able to do that?” Rock demands.
It is like a confession, to say it aloud after hours of pondering in silence. “Yes.”
* * *
***
By evening, word has spread throughout the corps about what’s supposed to happen the following morning. Dinner is quieter than usual, and when we turn off the lights in the girls’ dorm, it’s silent the way it can only be when people aren’t sleeping. In the end I throw the bedcovers off myself.
“Crissa?” I murmur. Her bed is next to mine.
I have no idea what I’m about to ask her, but she doesn’t make m
e find out.
“I’ve said my goodbyes,” she says. “You should say yours.”
It’s all I need to hear.
Goran’s office is unlocked. I let myself in and get his keys. At the stockade, the guards let me by without question. When I say his name outside the cell, I hear him stirring.
“Annie?”
He says it like he thinks he must be dreaming.
It’s dark inside, well past two in the morning already, and I can only see his outline as he gets to his feet. I unlock the door, let myself in, and before I can even go to him, I feel his arms around me, pulling me to him. “You’re cold,” he says, “you’re shivering . . .”
I hadn’t noticed. He sits me on the edge of his cot and wraps the blanket I gave him around me, and then he holds me close again.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” I say.
Lee lets out a quiet laugh in the darkness.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
No. I suppose he wouldn’t have been. I put the blanket around him, too, so that we’re sitting side by side, the blanket wrapped around us, and we’re as close as we used to sit in Albans, when he’d put his arms around me in that closet on the third floor.
“Let me keep this vigil with you,” I whisper.
In answer, he only presses me tighter. And then he winds his hand in my hair and lowers his face into my neck. It feels so right that a lump rises in my throat, and I lift my hand to cup his head to my shoulder, holding him there. I think of the glittering night from a world ago, where we held hands after a dance and it felt right, like this, but I pulled away. I can’t remember anymore why I did.
He inhales slowly. “Well, here we are,” he says.
Like here is the utter end, and he’s seen it coming all along.
“Do you . . . do you know what you’ll do?” I ask.
He lets out a laugh again, and it sounds a little like a cry.
“I know what I should do,” he says.
Whether he can do it, is another question.
“I keep thinking,” he says, his face still buried in my neck, “I keep thinking I should just take Pallor and run away.”
So, that’s how close he is to despair right now. To entertain the idea of turning his back on all of it.
But I know Lee better than that. And the one thing that I know, that has held true from the beginning, is that Lee doesn’t run. Lee stays. Even when it hurts him most.
“No, Lee,” I say.
He doesn’t respond, just clenches and unclenches his hands in my hair.
“You know you can’t do that.”
“Why not?” he asks dully. Like he knows, but wants to hear me say it.
And so, even though the only thing I want is for this feeling of his face buried against my neck to go on forever, I pull back. He’s forced to lift his head and look at me.
“Because you’ve been given this power, and you have a responsibility to use it. Giving it up—that’s as bad as giving the other side a dragon. You pick a side no matter what you do.”
Lee’s still for a moment. Like the words have stricken him. Then he looks away.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he says, “okay?”
“Okay,” I whisper.
We have about three hours before I have to leave.
For those three hours, we lie side by side, wrapped in the blanket, almost like lovers except it’s something more intimate than that. We talk about anything we can think of to push away thoughts of tomorrow, and for moments on end, we succeed.
But the distractions work too well, and time passes quickly, and in the end three hours feels cruelly short.
“Annie,” he says, when it’s time for me to leave. “If I don’t . . . if I can’t . . .”
It’s a question, even though it doesn’t sound like one. I make the promise that he wants to hear even as it breaks my heart to say it.
“Yes,” I tell him. “I’ll do it.”
He lowers his head into my hair, breathes in like he’s taking a final breath, and says, “Good.”
When I rise to leave, he seizes me, pulls me close, and hesitates. For a moment, as he stares at me with lips parted, I see the longing in his face.
Longing for me. So much longing that it looks like despair.
He lets out a groan so quiet it is barely audible, and with a tenderness that makes my eyes burn, he leans forward, tips my head down, and kisses me on the forehead. He quotes the Aurelian Cycle in Dragontongue.
You have given life to me.
As the touch of his lips on my forehead burns like a brand, understanding floods through me. I look up at him, taking in his face in the lantern light: the high cheekbones; the dark hair; the eyes that look older than ever tonight, set against a pale and careworn face.
I realize he’s never looked more like his father, and I don’t care.
I lift my fingers to his hair, bring his face to mine, and close the distance. For a moment the cool shock of his lips’ touch goes through me. Lee’s whole body has stilled. For a fleeting instant, as he freezes, I wonder if I shouldn’t have.
And then he inhales a shaking breath that I can feel, and his lips part on mine, and his hands go down from my hair to my waist. Still light, as if they dare not tighten on me—but then, as he begins to kiss me back, they do tighten. For a moment the kiss, too, is gentle, careful—I’m so conscious of my not knowing, of his knowing—and then he utters a sound so low in his throat that it may be a cry of need or perhaps sorrow muffled against my mouth. Then we’re no longer gentle, and I no longer care that I don’t know what I’m doing, because I know. My lips taste the first warmth of his tongue, my hands take in his chest and shoulders and neck as if they must make up time for all the years we haven’t touched, and I marvel at the feel of his hands, Lee’s hands, holding me so tight to him it’s like he wills our bodies to crush together as one. The strength that I have seen in wire-toned muscles now folded around me, their power on my body heady as wine.
I step forward, pushing him back, so that when he backs into the cot, he sinks down onto it. For a moment we continue to kiss as I stand between his knees and gather courage. But it’s too late to hesitate, too late now for shame, and so I do the one thing left I want to do. I climb onto his lap, fold my knees around him, and wind my arms around his neck to kiss him between drawn breaths. An echo of how we sat in Albans, when he used to hold me.
But this time, it’s I who am holding him.
And all the while his shuddering breaths, and the taste of his saliva mingled, finally, with salt, and someone is saying, I am saying, Come back to us, over and over again.
Until it becomes, at last, Come back to me.
LEE
Annie leaves me wondering whether I’ve dreamed it.
All the same, for the immeasurable space of what must be a half hour between her departure and Atreus’s arrival, the storms of my mind are stilled and all I can think, all I can remember, all that matters, is her lingering warmth.
Come back to me.
In the final hour, Atreus comes down the stairs flanked by two of his guard. He hands me my uniform himself. The armor glints a little in the growing light of dawn, the wingspread dragon with its four circlets of fire bold against the repurposed scales of the breastplate. Though the guards are bearing lanterns, their light is already weakening with the dawn.
When I’m armed, I ask him:
“Did you kill my father?”
Atreus is not expecting this, and for a moment we stare at each other. He is silhouetted in the lantern light.
“It won’t change anything,” I add. “But I need to know.”
One more thing that, for years, I haven’t let myself wonder. But it seems time to lay everything in the open.
Atreus answers curtly, though he meets my eye as he says it. “I
did. Though I considered it more an act of mercy than anything else.”
“Yes,” I acknowledge. “It would have been.”
Faint surprise shows on his face, and he makes the smallest gratified nod. Like it’s I who have just offered him mercy.
“You’re ready?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“I’ll be waiting for you on Pytho’s Keep,” Atreus says.
ANNIE
When I return to the Cloister, I find Power sitting alone, awake, in the solarium. The room is in shadow, the sky through the glass ceiling still dark. My hair is undone, my face damp, the taste of Lee’s lips still on mine.
“Did you enjoy your tearful goodbyes?” Power asks.
It’s the first time we’ve been alone in a room together since the day he confronted Lee in the caves. The bruises on my arms have begun to fade to yellow where he and Darius held them. When I start to turn away, he speaks again.
“Letter from the ministry. Just arrived. Addressed to the fleet commander.”
He holds it out. The seal is unbroken. I open it and read the message within while Power watches me from his armchair.
PLEASE AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CORPS IN THE CLOISTER. YOUR PRESENCE IS NOT NEEDED ON THE KEEP.
“Which does it say?”
I look up at him. Which?
“Do they want us there or not? When he gets back.”
“Does it matter?”
Power smiles and leans forward. “Antigone, I’ll admit it. I admire you. I admire how much shit you’re willing to take face-first to get what you want. But it pisses me off when you’re an idiot.”
I fold the letter and return it to its envelope.
“What,” I ask, “exactly, do you think I am being an idiot about right now?”
LEE
Pallor and I arrive first. The Riversource is in the heart of the highlands, a rocky clearing around a small, deep pool forming the hot springs of the River Fer. In Stormscourge lore, the gorge is said to be the place where the first stormscourge nests were found, where the first eggs were stolen, their hatchlings tamed by my ancestors. I’ve never seen the place before, but I’ve read of it. Looking around at the steep walls, the gorge famously impassable except by dragon, the intention behind Julia’s choice of location becomes as apparent as if she has said it aloud.
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